Part 16

The keynote of Mueller's career, even more than what he did for biology, and for all the biological sciences related to medicine, is the wonderful conservatism of thought which characterizes his scientific conclusions, while at the same time he began the application of the experimental methods {218} to medicine as they had never been applied before. At a time when physiologists, because of Woehler's recent discoveries of the possibility of the artificial manufacture of urea, might easily have been led to the thought that life counted for little in the scheme of the universe, Mueller continued to teach consistently that vital energy may direct chemical or physical forces, but must not be confounded with them. It looked as if in the development of the chemistry of the carbon compounds, all of which are the result of life action, that materialistic views must be expected to prevail. Mueller insisted, however, that life ever remains the guiding principle which rules and coordinates all the physical and chemical forces at play, within living organisms; and that the vital principle is entirely independent of these forces so closely attached to matter.

All Mueller's disciples, and they were the representative biological scientists in Germany during the nineteenth century, followed closely in his footsteps in this matter, and the result was a conservatism of thought in biology in Germany that is the more surprising when we realize how much German philosophers in their systems emphasized the necessity for absolute independence from all previous systems of philosophical speculation. It is so much more interesting, then, to find what was the method of education that made of Johann Mueller so conservative a thinker, while not injuring his genius for experimental observations. The influences that were at work in his earlier years were evidently those that made him subsequently the bulwark against materialistic tendencies in biology, and yet did not impair his originality. His early education was obtained under influences that are usually considered to be distinctly harmful to independence of thought, and yet they seemed to have helped him to the fulfilment of his destiny, as a great thinker and investigator. {219} Mueller is undoubtedly one of the very great men of modern science, and is the recognized founder of the system and methods of investigation which have given German medicine its present prominence and prestige.

In recent years there have been many tributes to Mueller, because as Virchow's teacher it was considered that some of the praise for the work done by Virchow must naturally reflect on the man to whom the great German pathologist acknowledged that he owed so much of his inspiration and his training in methods of investigation. Virchow's death too very naturally led to the recall of what had been accomplished in German medicine during the nineteenth century, and for much of this Johann Mueller must be considered as at least indirectly responsible, since to him so many of the great German medical scientists owed their early training. These men, all of them, did not hesitate to attribute the progress of German medicine to the methods introduced by Mueller. At the beginning of the twentieth century something of the estimation in which he was held in a land far distant from the German Fatherland may be gathered from the following tribute paid to him in a recent meeting of the Medical Society of the State of New York by Dr. C. A. L. Read, of Cincinnati, former President of the American Medical Association. In the midst of his panegyric of Virchow Dr. Read described in some detail the medical faculty of Berlin at the time when Virchow was beginning his work as a student at that University. He said:

"In the faculty there were Dieffenbach, the foremost surgeon of his day; Schoenlein, the great physician who had come from Zurich the same year to join, not only the teaching body, but to act as a reporting counsellor for the ministry and to serve as physician-in-ordinary to the King; Froriep, who was in charge of the Pathological Institute; Caspar, who {220} was also medical counsellor, with a seat in the special deputation for medical affairs in the ministry; but towering above them all was the intellectual figure of Johann Mueller, the Professor of Physiology. He was an original genius with daring, actually engaged in winnowing the wheat of demonstrated truth from the prevailing chaff of egoistic opinion which divorced physical science from speculative philosophy. Prompted by the inspiration which he had derived in turn from Bichat and the French school, the Professor of Physiology was busily retesting in the laboratory truths previously elaborated by Haller, Whytt, Spalanzani, Cullen, Prochaska, John Hunter, the Bells, Magendie, Berzelius and Bichat himself."

This is the tribute to Johann Mueller, nearly fifty years after his death. That of Virchow, at his obsequies in Berlin, is even more enthusiastic. Virchow, then at the age of thirty-seven, at the height of his powers, already acknowledged the greatest of living pathologists, just recalled to Berlin to become Professor of Pathology in the University which he had left more or less in disgrace because of his political opinions, could not say too much of the teacher whom he respected and honored so highly and whose inspiration he felt stood for so much in his own career.

He said:

"My feeble powers have been invoked to honor this great man whom we all, representatives of the great medical family, teachers and taught, practitioners and investigators, mutually lament and whose memory is still so vividly with us. Neither cares by day nor labors by night can efface from our mind the sorrow which we feel for his loss. If the will made the deed, how gladly would I attempt the hopeless task of proper appreciation. Few have been privileged, like myself, to have this great master beside them in every stage of development. It was his hand which guided {221} my first steps as a medical student. His words proclaimed my doctorate and from that spot, whence now his cold image looks down upon us, his kindly eyes beamed warmly upon me, as I delivered my first public lecture as Privat-Docent under his deanship. And, in after years, I was the one out of the large number of his pupils who, by his own choice, was selected to sit beside him within the narrow circle of the faculty.

"But how can one tongue adequately praise a man who presided over the whole domain of the science of natural life; or how can one tongue depict the master mind, which extended the limits of his great kingdom until it became too large for his own undivided government? Is it possible in a few short minutes to sketch the history of a conqueror who, in restless campaigns, through more than one generation, only made use of each new victory as a standpoint whereon he might set his feet and boldly look out for fresh triumphs?

"Yet such is the task to which we are called. We have to inquire what it was that raised Mueller to so high a place in the estimation of his contemporaries; by what magic it was that envy became dumb before him, and by what mysterious means he contrived to enchain to himself the hearts of beginners and to keep them captive through many long years? Some have said--and not without reason--that there was something supernatural about Mueller, that his whole appearance bore the stamp of the uncommon. That this commanding influence did not wholly depend on his extraordinary original endowments is certain, from what we know of the history of his mental greatness."

Virchow's tribute could not well be more enthusiastic or more ample. His appreciation has been the standard for all other medical opinions of the man. How much Mueller is honored at the present time in Germany can be best {222} appreciated from the number of times that his name is mentioned with respect and often with laudation in the proceedings of German medical societies. Scarcely a meeting passes in which more than once Johann Mueller is not referred to as the founder of the scientific method in medicine which has given Germany her present position in the very forefront of medical scientific progress. It is a common expression, said half in jest it is true, but surely more than half in earnest, that the proceedings of no medical society would be really successful within the bounds of the German fatherland unless they were hallowed by an invocation of the great name of Johann Mueller, the revered patron of modern German medicine. This is no witticism by exaggeration, after the American fashion, but a sincere Teutonic expression of feeling that occupies German medical minds with regard to the man who founded the most progressive school of modern medicine, and in doing so brought honor to his native country.

Johann Mueller was born at Coblentz, on July 14, 1801. About six months before, the Emperor of Austria by the treaty of Luneville, signed February 9, 1801, ceded to the French Republic all the Austrian possessions on the left bank of the Rhine. The electors of Treves, who were archbishops and reigning princes and who had resided for centuries at Coblentz, by this treaty disappeared forever from the list of German rulers. When Johann Mueller was born, French prefects of the Departments of the Rhine and Moselle took up their residence in the old town which had been, since the beginning of the French Revolution, a favorite dwelling place for the French nobility driven from their homes by fear of persecution.

Mueller's father was a shoemaker and lived in a small house in the street of the Jesuits, so called because the fathers had had a school in it for many years. Johann was {223} not destined to receive his education from the Jesuits, however, for the order had been suppressed nearly thirty years before his birth, and did not re-establish itself in the Rhineland for many years afterward. The circumstances of the Mueller family were not such as to encourage hopes of a broad education, though his father seems to have taken every possible means to secure as much school training as could be obtained for his son. The early death of his father promised to deprive Mueller of whatever advantages might have accrued from family sacrifices, but his mother was one of these wonderful women who somehow succeed in raising their families well and affording their children an education in spite of untoward circumstances.

Johann was the eldest of five children, with two sisters. He was very proud himself of the fact, that while he took from his father a large, strong, healthy frame and a dignified carriage, he had his mother's skill for putting things in order, her constancy of enterprise and her tireless faculty for hard work. After his father's death, his mother's energy and good sense enabled her to carry on the business established by the elder Mueller by means of assistants, and as Coblentz was the centre of a district that during the Napoleonic wars was constantly overrun with soldiery, the shoemaking trade was profitable.

Johann seems to have learned the trade, but his mother succeeded in enabling him to begin his education seriously at the age of eleven or twelve. About this time, Joseph Goerres, who was afterward the great leader of Catholic thought in Germany, and after whom is named the famous Goerres Gesellschaft which stands for so much in German Catholic life and progress, was a professor in the Sekunden Schule, or secondary school, in Coblentz, and had recently published treatises on natural philosophy with special {224} reference to physiology. Mueller entered this school in 1810 and Goerres did not resign his professorship until 1814, when owing to the publication of a political work he was obliged to flee from the country. It is not known how much influence Goerres exercised over young Mueller, but some at least of his precious love for the natural sciences, which even in his student days led to the making of natural collections of various kinds, seems to have been imbibed under the influence of the philosopher physiologist. The touching of the orbits of the two men, who were destined, more than any of their fellow-citizens of Coblentz, to influence Germany's future, must always remain an interesting consideration in the lives of both.

Johann's parents were, as might have been expected, down in the old Catholic Rhineland in the capital of the spiritual principality of Treves, faithful members of the Roman Catholic Church. Very early in life, Johann conceived the wish to become a priest. His mother, rejoiced at her son's idea, was ready to make every possible sacrifice to secure his education. It was with the intention of education for the priesthood, then, that Johann entered the Sekunden Schule, an old college of the Jesuits, in which Jesuit tradition and methods of education still survived, and in which some of the old Jesuit pupils seem still to have held positions even during Mueller's time as a student (1810 to 1817).

It would appear probable that because of the traditions of Jesuit teachings that held over at the school in Coblentz, and perhaps, too, because of the presence of some of the old masters and teachers trained by them, Mueller knew the ancient languages so well. He made his own translations of Plato and Aristotle, and consulted the latter especially always in the original and had a lifelong reverence for the great Greek philosophic naturalist's work, Latin he used {225} so well as to speak it readily, and practice in the disputations of the University at Bonn made the language still more familiar to him. It was said that he wrote Latin better than German. After the fall of Napoleon the Prussian government took up the reorganization of the schools in this part of the Rhineland, and Mueller became more interested in scientific studies. At this time he became devoted to mathematics, which he studied under the old pupil of Pestalozzi, Professor Leutzinger, to whom Mueller, in the sketch of his life prefixed to his thesis at the university, expressed the feeling that he owed a special debt of gratitude.

During his school days Mueller became a collector, as we have said, of natural objects. He was especially interested in butterflies for a time, and collected all the species in the country around. He had a curious dislike for spiders which remained with him all his life. He was able to overcome this, however, and made important studies of that insect's eyes, and of its changing expressions under the influence of fear or when about to fall upon its prey.

His feeling with regard to the insect is an index of a certain feminine quality of mind that had a characteristic expression in later life in his dislike for vivisection. He could not bring himself to the conclusion that animals must be sacrificed in the midst of horrible pain unless there was some very definite scientific point to be determined, and unless every precaution was taken to avoid inflicting needless suffering. Even then he preferred that others should do this work and more than once took occasion to point out the fallacy of physiological observations founded on animal experimentation under such anomalous circumstances, and insisted that very frequently the results gave conclusions only by analogy and not by any strict logic of animal similarity or absolute physiological nexus.

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In a sketch of Mueller's life, by Professor Bruecke, of Vienna, himself one of the most distinguished physiologists of the nineteenth century, to whom the University of Vienna has paid the tribute of a marble bust and tablet in its courtyard, the great Austrian physiologist sums up very well the reasons for Mueller's fame. Professor Bruecke's tribute may be found in the _Medical Times and Gazette_, of London, July 17, 1858. "If we inquire," he says, "what were the circumstances to which Mueller, independently of his high intellectual endowment, his gigantic power for work, the energy and massiveness of his character, and his active and vigorous bodily constitution, owed the commanding position he incontestably held among men of science in our day, we must admit that before all things this was due to the breadth and depth of the foundations upon which his intellectual cultivation had been built." Professor Bruecke then dilates on the variety of scientific interests which occupied Mueller's earlier years and the thoroughness with which he accomplished everything that he set himself to.

A very curious reflection on our modern methods of education, and especially the tendency to specialization and the formation of specialists from their very early years, is to be found in Bruecke's account of the extent and variety of Mueller's studies in all lines. Far from considering that these diverse intellectual interests hindered the development of his genius, he seems to consider that they rather aided in the evolution of that largeness of mind characteristic of the great genius. He says:

"In his schooldays Mueller's attention was directed to subjects of study far beyond the mere medical curriculum, for we find him attending the lectures of celebrated professors on poetry and rhetoric, on the German language and literature, on Shakespeare and Dante." As a matter of {227} fact, Bruecke seems to have understood that no one is so little likely to make scientific discoveries as he whose mind has been directed without diversion along the narrow lines of a specialty in science. Constantly trained to see only what lies in the sphere of this short-sighted interest, the mind never raises itself to a view beyond the horizon of the already known.

The old classical training, supposed to be so useless in this matter-of-fact, practical age, trained the minds of the men who have given us all the great discoveries in science. The evolution of intellectual power consequent upon the serious study of many things proved an aid rather than a hindrance to future original work. Not one of these great scientific investigators had at the beginning any hint of the work that he was to do. It seems almost an accident that their researches should have been conducted along certain lines which led to important discoveries. What was needed for them was not special training, but that mental development which puts them on a plane of high thinking above the already known, to look for progress in science.

Mueller continued for many years to entertain the idea of eventually becoming a priest. At about the age of sixteen, however, he became deeply interested in Goethe's work, and was especially attracted by the great poet's studies of scientific subjects. About this time he became interested in the collection of plants and animals and took up seriously the study of physiology. Lavater's work was, at that time, still sufficiently recent to have little of the novelty worn off, for young students, at least. At the age of eighteen Mueller went to Bonn and, when about to begin his university career, hesitated as to whether he should study theology or not. His natural liking for nature study, however, finally caused him to decide in favor of a scientific career, and he began the study of medicine.

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He took up his medical studies with the greatest enthusiasm. Under the special guidance of Mayer, who besides being his teacher was a personal friend, he applied himself zealously to the study of anatomy. One of his expressions in his early student days that has often been repeated, but which Mueller took the greatest care in later life to correct and deny as a lasting impression, was the famous "Whatever cannot be demonstrated by the scalpel, does not exist." The professor of physiology at the time at Bonn was the famous Fredrich Nasse, especially known for the wonderful attractiveness of his lessons and his power of arousing enthusiasm in others, and it is not surprising that Mueller, naturally so enthusiastic in scientific studies, should have acquired a liking for the study that he never afterward lost.

During Mueller's second year of medical study the University of Bonn announced its first prize, which was to be given for an investigation of the subject of respiration in the foetus. Although Mueller was only in his first year as a medical student at the time, he grappled with the difficult subject and devoted all his spare time to arranging experiments for the demonstration and investigation of doubtful points. He received the prize, and Virchow, surely a good judge in the matter, says that this work of his student days is distinguished alike by the extent of its learning and by the number and boldness of the experiments detailed. At the moment of his graduation, the young doctor, in his twenty-first year, was already a marked man. From this time on everything that he did attracted attention and had a ready audience.

Mueller's mind was constantly occupied after this time with the arranging of experiments to demonstrate natural principles. How far he carried this habit of experimenting can be understood from some of the habits of control over {229} his muscles which he had acquired by continual practice and intense attention. He had thorough control over the muscles of his ears and used often to amuse his fellow-students by their movements. The anterior and posterior muscular portions of this occipito-frontalis muscle were able readily to move his scalp and produce curious disturbances in his hair. These habits of muscular control many people have acquired. Other acquisitions of Mueller's are, however, much rarer. He could, at will, contract or dilate his pupils, having secured control over his iris by practice before a mirror, and he could use the little muscles that connect the bones within the ear, the hammer, anvil and stirrup, so as to make them produce an audible click at will.

His habits of experimentation on one occasion at least placed him in a rather ridiculous position. While making his military service, it happened one day that when the command "Order arms" was given, Mueller amused himself by inserting one finger after another into the muzzle of his firelock. At last his middle finger got fairly wedged into the weapon. When the order attention was given, Mueller could not withdraw his finger. His predicament at once attracted notice, and he was ordered to the front to be reprimanded by the major, to the no small amusement of his comrades, who laughed heartily at his ridiculous predicament. He was sent to his quarters in disgrace and the regimental surgeon had no little trouble in liberating the thickly swollen finger.

While everything thus seemed to promise a life of experimentation, Mueller's imagination had a powerful hold on him, and he gave himself up for some time to certain mystical theoretical questions and problems of introspection which, for a time, threatened to take him away from his real calling of an experimental physiologist. Fortunately for Mueller, as we shall see, though at the moment he doubtless {230} thought it a serious misfortune, these excursions into a too introspective psychology were followed by nervous troubles, what we could now call neurasthenia, and he was consequently led back to the study of external nature.